Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that kills, poorly. I'm your host this week, Shea, and with me are: I'm Aaron, and this week I learned that I won’t be leaving here with you… Oh, I know, I won’t be leaving… here… with… you. This is the story of the most botched successful assassination ever. We’re gonna start with the most badass-sounding secret society ever, no not the Skull and Bones, the Black Hand! The Black Hand, I’m a comic and superhero nerd so I get images of a clandestine cult of professional assassins and spies. According to the Elder Scrolls, they are the ruling party of the Dark Brotherhood, a group of elite assassins and spies, pretty much exactly as I picture them. In the real world though, the Black Hand was a Serbian secret terrorist organization that was formed days after Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 when a group of Serbian ministers and officials met, angry with Austria and planned to win their country back. Well, I guess they started as Narodna Odbrana (National Defense) and a few years later 10 members made a super double secret organization within the National Defense called Ujedinjenje ili Smrt (Union or Death), also known as The Black Hand. By 1914, there were several hundred members, perhaps as many as 2500. Many members were Serbian army officers. The professed goal of the group was the creation of a Greater Serbia, by use of violence, if necessary. The Black Hand trained guerillas and saboteurs and arranged political murders. The Black Hand was organized at the grassroots level in 3 to 5-member cells. Above them were district committees. Above them, was the Central committee in Belgrade. At the top was the ten-member Executive Committee led, more or less, by Colonial Dragutin Dimitrijevic, (also known as Apis ). Members rarely knew much more than the members of their own cell and one superior above them, to ensure that the group's leaders would remain secret. New members swore "...before God, on my honor and my life, that I will execute all missions and commands without question. I swear before God, on my honor, and on my life, that I will take all the secrets of this organization into my grave with me." If you are as old as Steve, that date might stick out to you because you love watching old World War 1 documentaries. This is the year the first great war starts and if you pay attention to the documentaries you may also remember the Black Hand, the jackasses that started it. If you aren't an old man really into war documentaries you will recall from high school history the name Franz Ferdinand and how his assassination was the shot heard around the world, you might not know how difficult the shot was to take. A bit of back history in case you don’t remember anything from high school. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, visited Sarajevo to commemorate Bosnia’s induction into the empire on June 28th, 1914. A group of Serbian rebels learned of his plans and decided to assassinate the archduke to protest Bosnia’s inclusion in the empire, feeling Bosnia should be part of a unified Serbian federal nation instead. The Serbian rebels, of course, were the Black Hand. The Black Hand, you’d think, would be a competent double super-secret society because they were made up of many Serbian military officers but you’d be wrong. It took 4 attempts and the final was pure luck. There were 7 assassins hired to kill Franz, all were amateurs and at least two had tuberculosis. Why they didn’t use a member with some military background is beyond me… The asses, sorry assassins were each given a gun or a bomb and a small vial of cyanide in case they got caught...